tury of our era (in the year
1360), the removal of soil necessary for such undertakings brought to
light geological facts, which attracted the attention of a people less
civilized than were many of the older nations of the East. The historian
Ferishta relates that fifty thousand laborers were employed in cutting
through a mound, so as to form a junction between the rivers Selima and
Sutlej; and in this mound were found the bones of elephants and men,
some of them petrified, and some of them resembling bone. The gigantic
dimensions attributed to the human bones show them to have belonged to
some of the larger pachydermata.[5]

But, although the Brahmins, like the priests of Egypt, may have been
acquainted with the existence of fossil remains in the strata, it is
possible that the doctrine of successive destructions and renovations of
the world, merely received corroboration from such proofs; and that it
may have been originally handed down, like the religious traditions of
most nations, from a ruder state of society. The system may have had its
source, in part at least, in exaggerated accounts of those dreadful
catastrophes which are occasioned by particular combinations of natural
causes. Floods and volcanic eruptions, the agency of water and fire, are
the chief instruments of devastation on our globe. We shall point out in
the sequel the extent of many of these calamities, recurring at distant
intervals of time, in the present course of nature; and shall only
observe here, that they are so peculiarly calculated to inspire a
lasting terror, and are so often fatal in their consequences to great
multitudes of people, that it scarcely requires the passion for the
marvellous, so characteristic of rude and half-civilized nations, still
less the exuberant imagination of Eastern writers, to augment them into
general cataclysms and conflagrations.

The great flood of the Chinese, which their traditions carry back to the
period of Yaou, something more than 2000 years before our era, has been
identified by some persons with the universal deluge described in the
Old Testament; but according to Mr. Davis, who accompanied two of our
embassies to China, and who has carefully examined their written
accounts, the Chinese cataclysm is therein described as interrupting the
business of agriculture, rather than as involving a general destruction
of the human race. The great Yu was celebrated for having "opened nine
channels to draw off th